A Beginner’s Guide to A Color Story

For the next Beginner’s Guide is A Color Story, which is a phone application that I love using! If I take any photo on my phone and want to send it to Instagram right away I will always edit the image through this application. Sometimes I’ll even send photos I took on my DSLR to my phone just to I can edit in this application over Photoshop. Granted I do love them equally. So how do you use this application?

Before After

For this guide, I am going to be using a photo I’ve used previously on the blog for a bath bomb post. At the time of that post I did not edit the photo in any way as I like the muted tones. However, on Instagram those were edited in A Color Story. So I’m going to show you how I achieved that.

Starting Out

When you first open the application you are given three options for where to grab the image you want to edit from: Photos, Recent (the very last photo in your album), or Camera.

Adjust Image

Next you will see your image show up with eight options between then you choose “Continue” to move onto the next step:

Square – This will make your image into a square which is perfect for Instagram.

Square with Border – This will add white borders to your image in order to turn it into a square without cropping out any of the image.

Crop – In this option you can choose how you want to crop the image: Free, 4×3, 3×4, 16×9, 9×16.

Rotate – Will rotate your image to the right.

Skew – This will rotate the contents of your image to the right or left without changing the dimensions of the image.

Depth – Allows you to adjust the depth of the photo either horizontally or vertically.

Flip – One option for horizontal and one for vertical.

Skew Depth

Tools

Next, you choose between using filters, effects, tools, saved filters/effects, and shop. In filters, you only get Essentials for free but each pack after is available for purchase for $2.99. Same goes with effects only Starter is available for free. And tools is available to all with no additional ones that can be purchased. This is where I recommend going to adjust images though I do like playing around with filters.

From tools, you have several things that you can use to adjust photos including: curves, clarity, contrast, bright, saturation, vibrancy, temperature, tint, hue shift, highlight, shadow, high color, midtone color, shadow color, exposure, sharpen, blur, grain, and vignette. These are all similar to the tools in Photoshop as they use sliders to make adjustments to the photos. Only unlike Photoshop, you cannot make layers so if you want to undo just one part of your changes you cannot remove that layer. You have to press undo until you get to that part. So say you add vignette then adjust curves then blur then midtone and you decide you no longer want the vignette. You have to undo everything just to remove that one part.

For example, the photo I choose to use as an example I adjusted curves, clarity, contrast, and brightness to create the final product.

When you are done, just press done then save & finish. From here you can share it out to social media, save those editing steps for later, or start all over again.